dinsdag 21 januari 2014

A resonant male voice—Stan McCann’s, she presumed—began belting
out “Delilah,” one of Tom Jones’ biggest hits, and the crowd cheered him and
the fact that the show had finally taken off.

“I saw the light on the night that I passed by her
window,” McCann sangas he proceeded down the stage-right
steps and strutted through the aisle,approaching Ellie’s row.All
decked out in a black bolero jacket with a sequined lapel, starched white
shirt, and satin cummerbund, he could have doubled for a bullfighter on a dude
ranch. He looked yummy. Good enough to nibble on.

“Stan? Oh, Stan?” Dorothy Hamill called in a high-pitched
squeal. Dorothy hurled her panties towards him, and they sailed past Ellie’s
face, landing in the middle of the aisle at his feet. “For you, honey,” she
cried.

Between stanzas, McCann retrieved the panties, rewarding Dorothy
with the attention she craved. Then he mopped his brow with them, causing a
fresh round of squeals. Like a toreador, he bowed theatrically to the smitten
panty-chucker. “Thank you, darlin’,” he purred, in a rich lilt that sounded
like he’d been weaned in Wales instead of the U.S.A. Then he aped sniffing her
panties. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

Dorothy screamed louder than the lovesick teenagers at the
first (and last) Hanson concert Ellie had attended in junior
high school. If Dorothy howled in her ear like that again, Ellie might have to
stomp on her brown suede boots.

She groaned out loud at Dorothy’s antics, which caught McCann’s
attention. He met her gaze, then cut his eyes to Dorothy’s face, giving her
outfit a onceover. “Sisters?” he asked.

As McCann strutted down the aisle toward stage left, Dorothy
turned on Ellie. “Why didn’t you tell him we were sisters?”

“Why do you think?”

Dorothy pouted. “But he was looking for sisters.”

I’ll bet he was. Ellie
thought. Or at least the persona he’d adopted was. But it was best not to scold
Dorothy. If she wanted to behave like a fawning groupie, that was on her. But
Ellie didn’t want to be sucked into that scene. It was common knowledge that in
his prime, Tom Jones slept with 250 groupies a year. If one of his
impersonators behaved like that as well, she wanted nothing to do with him. Nor
did the situation require launching into an explanation of why Ellie was in the
audience to begin with. Certainly not for a one night stand with a Tom Jones
impersonator, no matter how good he was.

No, Ellie clung to a thread of hope that she might find (dare
she even think it?) her soul mate here, not someone pawing at
her between the sheets for a quickie with the very next quickie waiting in the
wings.

As it turned out, a barrage of panties and one or two bras
chased McCann all the way to a set of wooden steps flanking the stage. The
stairs hadn’t been painted yet. In fact, the entire stage unit must have gone
up hastily, from the slapdash look of it.

McCann picked up one of the brassieres and swung it over his
head as if preparing to lasso some lucky Double-D cup in the crowd.

“Oh, oh, oh,” Dorothy cried, as if pained again.

This was some serious fan crush, bordering on groupie pathology.
Ellie was equally as enthusiastic a Tom Jones fan but prided herself on showing
more restraint.

McCann swayed back and forth in front of the stair unit, in
three-quarter time. Though his head and broad shoulders dipped right and left,
his crisp white shirt barely moved. Extra starch, she supposed.

“My, my, my, Delilah,” he sang, his unrequited love
for the two-timing Delilah infusing every grand gesture. As Ellie let the familiar
refrain in a pitch-perfect imitation wash over her, she recalled a particular
video of Tom Jones himself singing this song on some British version of
“American Bandstand,” while hundreds of young people struggled to fast dance to
a waltz-time ballad. Tom Jones warbled like a champ, but the crowd’s attempts
at dancing put her in mind of gooney birds doing the time step.

McCann had cultivated the singer’s signature mannerisms—punching
the air rhythmically, sliding from one note to the next in a dramatic portamento—and
every bit of the swagger.

“He’s a great impersonator,” Ellie said.

“Tribute artist,” Dorothy scolded. “These days, they like to be
called tribute artists.”

Ellie nodded sheepishly. Between the chorus and the next verse,
McCann started up the stairs to the stage. As he ascended the third step, it
was as if the show switched to slow motion. McCann lifted his left leg, poised
to land on the next stair. Ellie watched in horror as it crashed through the
plywood plank, tearing McCann’s perfectly creased pants and reducing his left
leg to an unsightly stump, at least from the audience’s perspective.

Festival-goers gasped. McCann stopped singing and clutched first
at his thigh and then at his groin, unable to extract himself from the jagged
plank.

“Help,” the baritone trilled in an agonizing register that rang
out almost an octave higher. “Somebody . . . help!”

The piped-in accompaniment stuttered to silence.

Who
Killed ‘Tom Jones’?

In Gale Martin’s newest novel, Ellie Overton is a 28-year-old
rest home receptionist with a pussycat nose who also happens to be gaga for the
pop singer Tom Jones. Regrettably single, she is desperate to have a red-hot
love relationship, like those she’s read about in romance novels. Following an
astrological hunch, she attends a Tom Jones Festival and meets an available,
young impersonator with more looks and personality than talent. Though he’s
knocked out of the contest, he’s still in the running to become Ellie’s
blue-eyed soul mate—until he’s accused of killing off the competition. It’s not
unusual that the handsome police detective working the case is spending more
time pursuing Ellie than collaring suspects. So, she enlists some wily and
witty rest home residents to help find the real murderer. Will Ellie crack the
case? Must she forfeit her best chance for lasting love to solve the crime?

Author Bio

Gale Martin is an
award-winning author of contemporary fiction who plied her childhood penchant
for lying into a legitimate literary pursuit during midlife. In 2011 Booktrope
Editions published her debut novel DON JUAN IN HANKEY, PA, a humorous backstage
story about an opera company trying to stage Don Giovanni, which was
named a “Best Kindle Book of 2013” by Digital Book Today. GRACE UNEXPECTED
(2012) features a professional woman with a heart of fool’s gold, who unexpectedly
gets entangled in a love triangle. She regrets never having the chance to
thrown a single unmentionable at Sir Tom Jones or one of his tribute artists.
She has an MA in creative writing from Wilkes University. You can find out more
about her at her website: http://galemartin.me.